captsolo weblog

The term “Social Media” (where “Media” suggests information publishing and consuming) may be the wrong name according to Doc Searls:

We are all authors of each other

One problem: I avoid using the term “social media". I don’t like it, and I don’t even want to know what it means. I may talk about blogging and podcasting and syndication and tagging and stuff like that. But I never think about any of those things as “media” and rarely visit their “social” nature (though I am sure they have one).

I don’t use the term “Web 2.0″ either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it’s the name we’ll give to the next crash.

…

I don’t think of my what I do here as production of “information” that others “consume". Nor do I think of it as “one-to-many” or “many-to-many". I think of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers.

Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.

The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about.

Is the term “Social Web” a more appropriate name?

Related:

“What is Wrong with Social Media?” - a summary of different points of view on Social Media collected by Brian Solis.

Can you suggest tools or web services for generating RDFa content from RDF?

Extracting RDF statements from (X)HTML+RDFa is a common task and that’s what many RDFa tools do. An example of such service is the W3C RDFa distiller service by Ivan Herman.

What about a “RDFa fusion” tool which gets (X)HTML and RDF content as input and produces (X)HTML+RDFa?

In domain specific situations one can use templating for inserting bits of RDFa in relevant places of (X)HTML markup. An example is the FOAF/RDF to FOAF/RDFa converter by Michael Hausenblas.

But that will not work in a general case when the structure of (X)HTML document is not known in advance.

Related:

• RDFa in XHTML is a W3C Recommendation [W3C Semantic Web Activity news]
• Templating Microformats from RDF by Danny Ayers where I spotted a link to Michael’s FOAF/RDF to RDFa converter

The new behaviour of a location bar in Firefox 3 might have come as a surprise to some users. And not always a pleasant surprise. It may be “smarter” but it can also ruin the user experience.

Here is some advice how to tweak it “back to normal":

9 tweaks for Firefox 3’s location bar

Firefox extensions which can help:

• OldBar extension (recommended)
• Old Location Bar (still experimental)

OldBar has a more solid feel to it and I will probably keep using it. But I would love to have the old URL lookup algorithm back (these extensions change the look-n-feel but not the algorithm). The one where only the URL is matched and not the page title.

Ian Davis wrote a reply on FriendFeed: “Stick with it [the new location bar], it’s changed how I bookmark (or not) completely.”

With the appearance fixed / improved (using OldBar) the location bar feels more useable already.

Currently it leaves me with mixed impressions: I like that you can enter multiple words in the location bar and they will be searched throughout the URL (and title). For example, enter a part of the hostname and refine the search by adding a part of the name of the file or wiki page. That’s nice.

Still do not like that it is searching in page titles. This is mostly garbage to me because page titles (1) do not uniquely identify the page and (2) do not always properly describe content of the page. Users relying on searching in page titles for locating the webpage of their internet bank can also be a tasty target for phishing.

P.S. Also check out user reviews to the OldBar extension.

… in continuation of a topic of rare books (started with Unbelievable price for a Photoshop book):

Daemon must be an amazing science fiction novel if it gets feedback (#1, #2 from reviews of the paperback edition of “Daemon”) like this:

• “DAEMON is better than early Tom Clancy (when he was good) …”
• “As a computer professional I found the technology in this book believeable –which is it’s most compelling feature. … I loved the book and have bought 7 copies (so far) as gifts …
• “I just finished the most thought provoking cyberpunk novel I think I’ve ever read: The Daemon by Leinad Zeraus.” - see a review by Dustin Kirkland

… hmm, how can a book be rare if it was published less than 2 years ago? Turns out it was sold out and the price of a used book on Amazon is “starting from $95.00″.

If this book has captured your attention and you do not have the book yet, there are some good news. A new hardcover edition is to be published in early January 2009 and is available for pre-order now. A sequel called Freedom™ is expected to follow.

For more information: Daemon book’s page [www.thedaemon.com]

P.S. Weird that author names on the two editions are different - it is Leinad Zeraus on the paperback and Daniel Suarez on the hardcover edition.

• Twitter is down for maintenance. ("It’s Cool, I Can Chill” -> “Hurry Up!” says the ice-cream cone on their custom status image).
• http://news.ycombinator.com/ has met a crawling death. The page is loading forever and never shows a complete list of news.

Where do you write when Twitter is down? A lot of what might become blog posts are expressed as short Twitter messages instead these days. But if it is down? Well, then the blog gets twitter-like messages such as this one.

Maybe you know how to add Offline access to MoinMoin wiki using Google Gears ?

Turns out that Fenfire knows how to render TeX markup.

While it is not a feature you might find very useful in an RDF browser, nevertheless this was an interesting discovery. Maybe there are more hidden gems like this?

More info:

• Fenfire project page
  
• “Browsing Linked Data with Fenfire” paper (PDF) at the 1st Linked Data on the Web workshop.
  

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Update: Thanks to tm who found that there is also a CSS score test:

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… following a meme via James Tauber, Dougal Matthews and Eric Florenzano:

* BASIC
* Turbo Pascal
* C
* C++
* MS Access (Visual Basic?)
* FoxPro
* x86 Assembly
* Java
* PL/SQL
* PHP
* JavaScript
* Python

Languages which I have had a brief encounter with but not enough experience to include them in the list above: Logo, FOCAL, REXX, Perl, Prolog, LISP, Haskell, bash.

Plus markup languages and others: HTML, SQL, XML, RDF/XML, Turtle, SPARQL, XUL, LaTeX.

This list almost tells a story (like looking at a photo gallery) about work and study experience. Almost, but not quite. To make a story complete some languages would need to appear twice or more - when first learned and when used again, in combination with other languages and architecture components.

Update: had forgot to add PHP (I wonder why ). fixed.

AAAI-SSS-09: Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0

Update: Submission deadline was extended to October 10, 2008.

It takes place at the Stanford University on March 23-25, 2009 as a part of the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia

” In this symposium, we are interested in bringing together the semantic web community and the social web community to promote the collaborative development and deployment of semantics in the World Wide Web context. We welcome constructive papers on, for example: (i) how semantic technologies, especially knowledge representation and collective intelligence, can benefit social web content organization and retrieval; (ii) how social web technologies can facilitate massive semantic content production; and (iii) how to address the requirements, e.g., reasoning scalability and semantic convergence issues, which emerge from the combination.

… there is more information (topics, …) on the website …

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Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop

If looking for events within a shorter timeframe, you are welcome to come to the 1st Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop at ISWC 2008.

It takes place in Karlsruhe, Germany on October 27, 2008.

List of accepted papers:

• “A Hybrid Social Entity Reconciliation Algorithm for Interlinking Online Social Communities” by Chunying Zhou and Huajun Chen
• “A state of the art on Social Network Analysis and its applications on a semantic web” by Guillaume Ereteo, Fabien Gandon, Michel Buffa, Patrick Grohan, Myl?ne Leitzelman and Peter Sander
• “Combining Social Music and Semantic Web for music-related recommender systems” by Alexandre Passant and Yves Raimond
• “Expressing Argumentative Discussions in Social Media Sites” by Christoph Lange, Uldis Boj?rs, Tudor Groza, John Breslin and Siegfried Handschuh
• “Getting to Me – Exporting Semantic Social Network from Facebook” by Matthew Rowe and Fabio Ciravegna
• “LODr – A Linking Open Data Tagging System” by Alexandre Passant
• “Modeling Online Presence” by Milan Stankovic
• “RDFohloh, a RDF wrapper of Ohloh” by Sergio Fern?ndez
• “Semantify del.icio.us: automatically turn your tags into senses” by Maurizio Tesconi, Francesco Ronzano, Andrea Marchetti and Salvatore Minutoli
• “Towards Opinion Mining Through Tracing Discussions on the Web” by Selver Softic and Michael Hausenblas
• “Towards Socially Aware Mobile Phones” by Alessandra Toninelli, Deepali Khushraj, Ora Lassila and Rebecca Montanari
• “Wikipedia Mining for Triple Extraction Enhanced by Co-reference Resolution” by Kotaro Nakayama

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Full disclosure: I am taking part in organizing these events.

The picture above is a word cloud generated from recent content of this blog, created using Wordle.

Wordle is a service for creating “word clouds” from the text or feed provided. Users can then change cloud layouts, fonts and colors in order to a visually attractive representation of word frequency in the source text. Final result can be saved to a gallery.

These “word clouds” are more interesting to me as a blog author compared with tag clouds. In the latter you would not find many surprises because you already know what tags you typically assign to posts. Word clouds can be more interesting because they are created automatically based on the “raw” content of blog posts and they can contain some surprises.

Do you think there are ways to make these word clouds (1) more interactive and (2) useful for machines too?

On the interactive side of things one could make a list of matching posts appear when you select a word from the cloud.

As for making this information reusable by software I do not have a clear answer, but one could adapt SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) ontology to express word clouds. MOAT (Meaning of a Tag) ontology is also nearby but not sure how it would fit into this use case.

See also:

• CaptSolo blog word cloud in Wordle’s gallery. Has the same content as the image above, but it has a different and more colorful layout with black background (update: added a snapshot of it after “read more").
• Wordle concept maps at leobard’s blog: “A quick and fun tool to make nice calligraphically-good-looking tag clouds out of your own tags (works with delicious)”

Read more! »